I read the book Code Girls by Liza Mundy for the Literary Non Fiction Unit. Code Girls is an inspirational novel, telling the tales of the brave and smart young women who fought the wars backstage. Rather than following one or a select few people the book follows a timeline focusing more on the events of WWII than people in the war. Code Girls shows how the women helping in the background of WWII actually managed to do some of the most important jobs, including decoding machines from the enemies and even entering active service due to not enough recruits. I was quite intrigued by this book although it is not one I would regularly read. As you continue through my Blog post please note what I discovered.

The first image above shows an outline of the unit, using many examples from Code Girls. I found it helpful to be able to see all of the lessons on two pages as it showed how my thinking shifted or how it expands on different ideas/themes. It becomes easier to connect different ideas and lessons together all while still being separated. I prefer this method to mind maps because mind maps get so confusing once they become crowded. It may take more time this way but it also shows more of my thinking throughout the book.

Town Hall Debate

This page is a prep page for the Town Hall Debate that occurred the next day. We were to pick a central idea from our text, find four piece of evidence – one each – and explain how the central idea and evidence connected. After the explanation, everyone had a chance to ask one question per table. You would then answer said question if you could or you would politely pass on the question. Our central idea was “History takes the tragedy out of death and puts it into a statistic”. I believe our town hall debate skills were a 10/10, we were a united front as we stated our claim and answered all of the questions. The debate was one of my favourite activites we did this unit.

Central Idea Assessment

Directly after the debate we had this Central Ideas Assessment. The requirement was 1 central idea, 4 pieces of evidences, connections and a summary to explain how the evidence related to the central idea. Finding the central idea was less difficult than the evidence to go with the central idea because there were some quotes that fit better than others and some I couldn’t find at all. In my opinion, the hardest part was the connections with the evidence because I kinda forgot about that part and wrongly ordered the evidence.

My favourite lesson we had overall was definitely Lesson 8 – Descriptive Passages. I found it so interesting how authors used the settings to introduce/convey the emotion of the environment whilst keeping readers intrigued. Not only that, but also how it sets the tone in movies, tv shows and videos in general. Rereading or just continuing the book and finding all of the little details hinting at the tone of the environment.

Overall, I found the unit quite enjoyable. I may not have enjoyed my book too much but I did find that comparing my book to our mentor text, Hidden Figures because although Code Girls didn’t have lots of segregation the similarities between Hidden Figures and Code Girls revolved more around gender inequality. This unit was certainly a 8/10 but the book was a 6/10.